Visualization and real-time tracking of bone drill by electromagnetic position sensors

With the assistance of the surgical navigation system, surgeons could visually operate medical instruments, which are connected to the navigation system, to touch an internal anatomical structure of the patient. The medical instruments and patients are simultaneously shown on the screen. This paper researches on the visualization and real-time tracking of bone drill by electromagnetic position sensors. Firstly, the principle and components of the electromagnetic positioning system are introduced. Then a plastic structure mounted on the bone drill is designed to reduce registration time of the bone drill after disinfection. And an iterative algorithm is developed to calculate the positions of the drill end. Lastly, the software based on the VTK (visualization toolkit) is developed to demonstrate the effect of the method for visualization and realtime tracking of bone drill.